|
Photo: Courtesy of http://billyjoel.com
Of all the folks who should have shown up to play an impromptu gig down at Zuccotti Park, it should have been Billy Joel.
“The Piano Man” could have paired up with another quintessential New York music outfit, Make Music New York, which has provided the city’s parks with a number of traveling pianos over the years. They would have brought out one of their beautifully battered uprights, and he could have let rip.
Requisite on the playlist: “New York State of Mind.”
The Occupy Wall Street protestors have sparked the imagination and fueled a renewed focus on the gross socioeconomic inequities of a system that continues to allow for disparate parallel universes in which corporate banks guilty of malfeasance are deemed too “big to fail,” but New York State foreclosure prevention programs are expendable (see New York State Homes and Community Renewal’s Foreclosure Prevention Services Program; Dec. 31, 2011).
That OWS protestors have chosen to do so first in a city with the greatest wealth disparity in the nation, with the city’s richest man as its mayor, is no coincidence.
Neither is Mayor Bloomberg’s decision to expel the protestors and their tent encampment at 1 a.m. in the morning.
Say what you will (“Get a job” is popular), the protestors have sparked dialogue around issues of inequity and socioeconomic justice that are too easily obscured by far less discomfiting realities.
Look over here, it’s much ado about 72-day marriages and about Mitt Romney’s real name.
Yet the emerging challenges faced by a newly floundering middle class have long been the domain of the working poor in this country, and this city: uncertain education and employment prospects, declining wages, and inadequate housing.
These folks know about eviction notices, and worrying about a future seemingly dimmed by crippling loans and stagnant wages.
Worse yet, many are mired in poverty living in areas riddled with crime, damning health disparities and little in the way of resources to see them through.
And while the Occupy Los Angelenos play ranchero music, and there are “occupiers” in Atlanta, Rio de Janeiro, Miami, and Newark, the reality is there is no place like home – and there is no finer birthplace for such a movement than a city in which greed is still good.
As Bloomberg himself noted at a recent breakfast panel discussion marking forty years of The Association for a Better New York (ABNY), with which he sat with former Mayors David Dinkins and Ed Koch, there is no other place like it in the world. He noted that New York’s smoking ban in 2003 elicited tremendous reaction, both in favor and against, across the world. But California, the country’s largest state, had done it first, in 1995.
“But no one cared,” said Bloomberg.
It just wasn’t New York.
And so a thought, for all those who would wish to keep the chants going, would wish to keep the fires of indignation burning through winter: It turns out New York is rather large.
There are other spaces, private and public, throughout the City, in northern Manhattan, and in the Bronx, in Queens and in Brooklyn too, that might handily accommodate a bit of noise, and organized rebellion.
Foley Square might do in a pinch.
But if as many protestors evicted that day claim, the movement is but a state of mind, and it cannot be stopped, then why not take gather together, earnest and en masse, and hop a train or a bus crosstown, and uptown, where the 99% are struggling not so much to beat the crush on Black Friday, but every day – at C-Town, at the day-care, and at the unemployment line.
Bring the tents, the tarps, the medical center.
Bring the sleeping bags, and the drums.
Find your brethren, los indignados, on Broadway and the Grand Concourse, on St. Nicholas Avenue and Morris Avenue.
There should be room in some of our other squares, lots, parks, and triangles for some of the Open Mic sessions that have folks rising up and speaking out about the pain they’ve been feeling for a while now.
It’s just a state of mind, one that is innate, is real, and can travel, right?
The cameras should follow.
Hell, maybe even Billy Joel, too.
“But I know what I'm needing
And I don't want to waste more time
I'm in a New York state of mind.”
|
